[Info] SSD Reviews/Benchmarks Repository

[Super Nade]

Thanks, I turned it on. Also, would turning off logs in the event of a system failure help? I also disabled the memory dump file. Or is it better if I move all the logging stuff to the magnetic drive?

I also turned off System restore. have imaged my SSD and if it comes to that, I will re-initialize the drive and slap the image back on.

 

[corpsejockey]

Thanks, I turned it on. Also, would turning off logs in the event of a system failure help? I also disabled the memory dump file. Or is it better if I move all the logging stuff to the magnetic drive?

I also turned off System restore. have imaged my SSD and if it comes to that, I will re-initialize the drive and slap the image back on.

Yo, Super N00b.

You want me to drop mine off today so you can get some raid results.

 

[Super Nade]

Dude, my install is on its way out. I did the "official DFI dumbass CMOS" reset procedure and it worked for a little bit. I'm still having problems. I need your external to backup my data. If you are not doing anything special on 7/4, I'd like to pull a Rambo on my magnetic drives at your dad's place. I'm done with this crap.

SSD is yours till I figure out what is going on?

 

[Super Nade]

Anybody running a Samsung based Corsair?

 

[Randyman...]

So, I dove in and bought an X25M 80GB a few weeks ago from M-Wave ($279!), and I just had to compliment it with a second one. #2 arrived on Tuesday. Here are a few Benches (2 drives in RAID-0 on Maximus Formula ICH-9R):

ATTO 256MB @ 10 Que Depth:

HD Tach @ 32MB Long Zones:

Diskmark 10 – 5 passes @ 50MB/ea:

I wish the X25M's had more of the Vertex's Write speeds - but from what I gather the Intel still has a leg up.



For comparison, here is my Data RAID-5 Array which consists of 6x 1TB 7200.11’s on an Areca ARC-1222:

ATTO 256MB @ Que Depth 4

I wish the SSD’s writes were that quick, but I’ll gladly take the SSD’s miniscule access times over raw bandwidth for an OS Drive application.

I left my Page File on the SSD, but I did the other tweaks, and I’m really enjoying the system’s overall responsiveness. I’ll be swapping my CPU and MoBo later this week, so I’ll have more benches with an ultra-tweaked system in a few weeks…

I should mention that this is actually a GHOSTED install. I initially installed Vista SP1 on the single X25M, but I had the controller in RAID mode. I cloned it to a spare 74GB Raptor, built the SSD RAID-0 array, and re-cloned the installation back to the RAID-0. I verified the partition is still aligned to 2048KB – I read this was not the case, but I guess as long as you clone an ALREADY ALIGNED partition, then it will copy back over “aligned”. Go figure

 

[Voidn]

Nice info guys!

Glad intel fixed the fragmentation problem (go PCP). One of the reasons I went w/ blacks in raid instead of SSD. Any word on the TRIM command being implemented? From the anadtech review page 10: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=10

//sorry if I'm being lazy and asking instead of looking myself.

 

[Evilsizer]

ok i posted this else where but might as well here too. twin Agility 60gigs,raid-0 stripe 128k/aligned 128, windows 7/disabled superfetch/disabled restore-backup/disabled indexing/disabled searching/moved pagefile to Seagate 320gig/enabled write back caching.

Atto (right after win7 install the second time *needed to make sure the partition was aligned for raid setup*)

Crystal Diskmark (after i downloaded some DX10 demo games and played Lost planet demo agian.)


@imposter
odd your vertex's should be much faster then my raided setup....

@sn
here is a list of what OCZ drives use what controller
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=358&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=1

*edit*
here is a HD TACH and here is HD TUNE results. this is done on what i consider a well used setup, unistalled many programs/demos since the last set of bench runs on the raid setup.

 

[Super Nade]

Updated first post

 

[MattNo5ss]

First of all, great thread with a lot of good info.

I've been looking into SSDs for possible upgrades to my desktop and PS3. After reading many threads and reviews, it seems the drives with Indilinx controllers are the best bang/buck option. So, I've been searching for all the Indilinx SSDs that I can find and comparing speeds and prices. I just wanted to mention a few Indilinx drives that aren't in the above list. The majority may already know this, but I'm an SSD noob, and I'm sure others like myself would appreciate a nice, updated list of drives with specific controllers.

Corsair Extreme
SuperTalent UltraDrive ME
OCZ Agility
Crucial M225

Also, based on all the specs on OCZ's website the 60GB Agility is cheaper and better than the 60GB Vertex. The specs are identical except that the Agility get 80MB/s sustained write whereas the Vertex gets 70MB/s. It's ONLY the 60GB versions though, the Vertex 30GB and 120GB are better than the Agility 30GB and 120GB. This seems odd to me, but I'm just going by the specs listed...

 

[Evilsizer]

the cruical m225 in 60gig range is the best Indilinx price/gig.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148318 @$175

to think i got my two ocz agility's for $189, now they are $199...

 

[Evilsizer]

just found this X25m vs Fusion IO
interesting read for sure...

 

[Evilsizer]

bump for a edit to post 27.

 

[Wraith]

On my Sager D900F, but I figured you guys might want to see. This is 3x 80 gig x25m g2 drives in a raid 0 128k stripe. Might lower the stripe size a bit to bring up the small reads/writes.

 

[KTE]

bump for a edit to post 27.

Thanks for the Agility benches... without a doubt the only Desktop SSD that currently interests me for home.

But I'm after some real data before I can buy and good unbiased data is scant on the Agility, after more than a month in usage. Do you have any FC-Test results posted anywhere on your RAID 0, like so?

I'm able to get 30GB Agility at 200% price of 1000GB WD Caviar Black, 185% price of 1500GB Seagate Barracuda and 160% price of 1500GB Samsung F2... makes it a abit more appealing than usual for a non-hardware junky who doesn't require more than 25GB on >90% of the system drives.

 

[visbits]

On my Sager D900F, but I figured you guys might want to see. This is 3x 80 gig x25m g2 drives in a raid 0 128k stripe. Might lower the stripe size a bit to bring up the small reads/writes.

I think your running out of bandwith to the sata controller for read.


2x 80gb x25-m G1 raid 0.

 

[Evilsizer]

Thanks for the Agility benches... without a doubt the only Desktop SSD that currently interests me for home.

But I'm after some real data before I can buy and good unbiased data is scant on the Agility, after more than a month in usage. Do you have any FC-Test results posted anywhere on your RAID 0, like so?

I'm able to get 30GB Agility at 200% price of 1000GB WD Caviar Black, 185% price of 1500GB Seagate Barracuda and 160% price of 1500GB Samsung F2... makes it a abit more appealing than usual for a non-hardware junky who doesn't require more than 25GB on >90% of the system drives.

well atm im tring to figure out what the FC test is.............

but im not breaking my raid array to run some benchs on fat32..

*edit*
ok, i know what it is now... though the only verision for download i can find is from 2002...

 

[KTE]

well atm im tring to figure out what the FC test is.............

but im not breaking my raid array to run some benchs on fat32..

*edit*
ok, i know what it is now... though the only verision for download i can find is from 2002...

It can be run on any storage device as it is, NTFS/FAT32 doesn't matter.

It is just a GUI to a script to create files of chosen size/number in a directory, at your likening. So it lets you create files on the storage media at a chosen directory, read them, copy them to a chosen directory and delete them, and times each of these processes automated (copy is multi-threaded simultaneous read+write). We can get the MB/s number by simple inversion of workload and time.

The file sizes/number for the creation task is controlled by the selected "Pattern". You can select either of the patterns already available which test exactly what they say (i.e. ISO create/read/delete/copy, etc). "ISO pattern" is obviously a few large files of given parameters and "MP3 pattern" is many small files in comparison. The number of files for each pattern and each file size is already given. Each workload isn't small enough to fake or trick and you can check the chosen directories to see what was created/moved/deleted. For standardized reporting and comparison, hardware reviewers use the given patterns as they are representitive of the performance of the storage media in such tasks with the workloads, according to their titles. For standardized reporting and comparison again, it's best to run the tests in a folder under the highest drive directory (i.e. C:\test\)... what most of us do. It will offer the best and most representitive performance since that is near to where application/windows installs/reads/copies/deletes are for the most part.

The other tests you can do is point the application to a directory with "Scan directory" (like a game install) and tell it to use that as a pattern. If you do this, then it will make files exactly in the number and sizes of the directory you pointed it to for you to be able to test performance of any read/write/delete/copy to and of that directory. Close to the best realistic storage test out as it mimics real world.

By being a simple script calling basic Win API commands, it hasn't needed any updating since 2002. It's been checked for modern storage by the creators many times recently as well as by most hardware reviewers who use it including myself. The last version is 0.3 which was first released in 2002, yep.

There is a new one coming with more functions, but I've heard that since last year... hope it's clearer now.

 

[germanjulian]

Hi,

got the Intel X-25 160 SSD 3 days ago, I was just sick of my slow HD and decide to take the plunge. I also "only" use the Asus P5W DH Deluxe and Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 on my Windows 7 64bit machine so a fairly old setup.

Luckily I asked in the Intel Forums about Win7 + SSD and read up a lot about SSD drives and it seems that Windows 7, even though its supposed to work, does not do its self configuration for SSD drives for a lot of people.

For reference here is a list of points people should keep in mind when going SSD:

• Make sure you enable AHCI in your BIOS: This is how your BIOS talks to SSD drives and replaced the standard IDE + IDE Enhanced way of talking to disk, without this Win7 will not use the right drivers for SSD support now will SATA's native command queuing work apparently which can speed of Intel SSD performance considerably apperantly!
• Its best to do a fresh install of Win7 when going from normal HD to SSD (see above, I read you can get nice BSOD when changing your BIOS settings afterwards)
• Use AS SSD benchmark program to see if you are using the AHCI drivers and use the correct block size (? I don't quite understand this). I think this is something Windows 7 sets when formatting the SSD disk and when not configured correctly data writes are not done correctly filling and fragmenting the data more

Even after a firmware update to the latest Intel firmware, a BIOS update (latest), a fresh Win7 install and AS SSD benchmark confirming everything was fine did Windows 7 not configure itself for the SSD correctly.
So I had to manually configure Windows 7 for my new SSD drive.

The following things should not be enabled when using an SSD drive:

• Defragmentation
• Superfetch (part of ReadyBoost)

optionally you also want to disable Drive Indexing.

I will use the drive a few days and see if TRIM at least works if not I will just use the Intel Toolbox every 2 weeks.

So far I love the SSD's speed though

Reference: http://communities.intel.com/message/79567#79567 and Intel forums and a lot of google searches

Here you can see I am using the Microsoft AHCI drivers so Windows 7 should know this is an SSD drive, you can also see the block (?) size in green. I have seen screenshoots on the Intel forum of not correctly configured drives and the value becomes red.

 

[Raptor77]

I read that:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

in Run will let you know if TRIM is working correctly (in which case it will return a zero value). I haven't seen any official information on this but it returns a 0 for me and I've not noticed any performance degradation with use.

And I'm not sure a drive clone to SSD rather than a fresh W7 install causes any extra problems, I just had the same ones as you - defrag etc needed to be manually disabled.

 

[prime81]

Here is my twin Agility 60 giggers in RAID 0.

i7 950 @ stock
rampage 2 extreme
6gigs OCZ DDR3 1600


HD Tach

ATTO